France: Emmanuel Macron explains to the students who are the yellow vests

Thursday, March 28, the President Emmanuel Macron visited the city of Beaupréau-en-Mauges, in Maine-et-Loire, 355 km from Paris. The meeting with about fifty students took place in the private school of this town of 23,000 inhabitants who has no public high school. During these exchanges, which lasted about two hours, the head of state was particularly questioned about the movement of yellow vests.

To the question "What do you think of yellow vests?", the President of the Republic has distinguished two "types" of protesters, linked to two phases of the movement: "At the beginning, last November, people wearing yellow vests looked more like people who said to themselves:" It's not fair, we have to get to work by car and it becomes more and more expensive, We have many limitations and we live badly. "I want to give them an answer, "added the president..

"We try to give the first answers in December, to do things to earn more, to live better ", continued Emmanuel Macron. "Then we saw some extremely violent people who broke everything … (…) And I do not agree with them at all, these are the yellow vests that I do not want (…) For a society to work, everyone must respect each other . There is nothing that justifies breaking, attacking the police, not being respectful with the other. This is unacceptable, there is no reason to justify that, and here we must be inflexible ", added the head of state in a firmer tone, saying that he expects the end of the move as soon as possible. "

And he finished: "I heard the message, I think everyone heard it, so now It is important that these people know that their revolt has no justification …to those who mutinied, I have no sympathy, "concluded the President of the Republic before this young badembly.

The end of the "Great debate"

The "grand national debate" organized by the President has been completed. Macron added nearly 100 hours of meeting during these two months of debate. The meeting with 64 intellectuals on March 15 in the Eliseo Palace lasted more than eight hours. One of the participants in the meeting said that Macron spoke without interruption without even taking a break to go to the bathroom. He devoted himself carefully to answering the multiple questions of the participants, reproducing and developing his governmental program, hinting that there will be no substantial changes in your policy despite the mobilizations of "vests" that are already in their fifth month of action.

In this meeting, the philosopher and sociologist Dominique Méda criticized the president for questioning the French social model, explaining that it would have been necessary to launch an important investment plan for the energy transition, creating jobs (20 billion euros per year), increasing taxes of the richest and leaving the deficit stuck by the EU increase by 3%. % of GDP. Méda then regretted in the newspaper Libération that the intellectuals of the opposition were "taken hostage"since the meeting became "a propaganda meeting of the presidency". Others have sent SMS quoted by Live Liberation: "It's a big trap, it's serving soup and it's bombarding us with its political communication." Frédéric Lordon, Thomas Piketty and Gérard Noiriel, among others, rejected the invitation.

The repression continues

In parallel with the "big debate" the jackets continued to march in several cities of France. The new prefect of Paris recently named by Macron decided to ban almost all the usual places of the demonstrations. Other cities have imitated it. Despite this, marches and demonstrations continued: on Saturday, March 30, 102,000 protesters spread over 133 sites in France, announced the organizers.

Arrests and beatings were also present. A 73-year-old woman was hospitalized for a broken skull after a police officer struck her on Saturday, March 23 in Nice. Geneviève Legay, spokeswoman for Attac, was conducted without ceremony while demonstrating peacefully. (view the photo) President Macron tried to apologize to the police saying that no one had touched him, a lie that was subsequently refuted by the Nice public prosecutor and the police officer involved. Geneviève Legay's lawyer filed a complaint on behalf of the protester's three daughters "deliberate acts of violence committed during a meeting by a public authority official, with use of a weapon and on a vulnerable person". On March 25, a crowd gathered in the center of Nice in solidarity with Geneviève.

The month of April will be complicated for President Macron: Prime Minister said Monday, April 8 in his speech that "obviously, the tens of millions of words and the hundreds of thousands of ideas expressed by our fellow citizens are difficult to summarize in a few words or by a speech. Whatever your format, any summary will always be a little reductive. "But when he said what he had finally withheld from the results of the consultation, the prime minister simply He abandoned his precautions. And he chained the generalities: "the French want …", "the French know …", "what our compatriots told us …" This semantic change is anything but harmless, because it reflects the will explicit government generalize the results of the "big debate" to legitimize future decisions, which will be announced in mid-April by the President of the Republic.

In your party, voices require a quick response, at least on the issue of the necessary indexation of pensions with inflation and on the participative democracy. The ruling party is studying a "citizen's bill" that should be supported by at least one million citizens. A proposal that could then be treated as a bill by the National Assembly. Other measures are under discussion but nothing indicates that Macron agrees to apply them.

A "yellow" spring

during a meeting of bademblies with 300 delegations of yellow vests from all over France gathered on April 5, 6 and 7 in Saint-Nazaire. 700 people discussed how to follow and structure the movement. Among the exchanges emerged as the main focus the organization of a "yellow week". "A year ago, Emmanuel Macron invited new businesses in the Île-de-France to" think of spring, "said a delegate, well, for the anniversary of his two years We will offer you a "yellow spring" May 1st to 4th This is the starting point for a calendar of actions that will extend until the fall. "Even if we do not validate all these dates here, Macron knows that we are seriously considering a major action on the occasion of the G7 celebration, May 4th and 5th in Metz. "